It felt like an episode of "The Twilight Zone" to pass through
Florida last weekend. There, splashed over
most of the front page of Sunday's Palm Beach Post, was the paper's
investigative scoop: Palm Beach
County's butterfly ballot cost Al Gore "about 6,600 votes, more than
10 times what he needed to overcome
George W. Bush's slim lead in Florida."

It felt like "The Twilight Zone" because beyond Palm Beach - or Boca,
at any rate - who knew or cared?
I turned on my TV and had to search to find a mention of the Post's
story. It might as well have been a hallucination.

This is less an indictment of the national media than a political reality.
Democrats may be furious about being
robbed in Election 2000, but they don't go in for nostalgia about what
might have been. They don't know
where Al Gore is, or (even now) who he is. They don't know where the
Democratic Party is. It was also last
Sunday that Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's labor secretary, declared
in The Washington Post that the Democrats
are "an ex-party" that has "expired and gone to meet its maker." Who
would argue? The party that won the
popular vote on Nov. 7 stands for little and has no evident leaders.
In the Senate, the best the Democrats can
come up with for a political strategy is a death watch.

If too much has been said about the Clinton post-presidency, too little
has been said about the Al Gore
post-vice presidency. His narrow, very un-Dukakis-like loss has not
emboldened him but seemingly thrust him
into the witness protection program. The only public issue on which
he's taken a loud stand is the death of Dale
Earnhardt. (He was against it.) He remained mum about the Clinton pardons
— even as he leaked his disfavor
sotto voce through emissaries — and about George W. Bush's reversal
this week on a signature Gore issue,
global warming. Showing the same political skills that animated (barely)
his campaign, Mr. Gore has instead
made news by reconnoitering with his biggest donors at an Upper East
Side dinner at the very height of the
pardons fracas and by teaching a Columbia Journalism School class that
initially placed the fledgling reporters
in his tutelage under a gag order.

Into the Clinton-Gore vacuum comes . . . who? Would-be '04 candidates
like Senators John Edwards and
Evan Bayh are tossing their hats into the Cokie-chat circuit, not so
much because they have compelling
thoughts or achievements but because they fit the media's ideal mold
for political "fresh faces" — they resemble
ambitious, if mid-market, local TV news anchormen. In their televised
response to President Bush's
Congressional address, Tom Daschle and Richard Gephardt offered not
an alternative governmental vision but
a hastily assembled alternative tax cut, dressed up in some of the
populist rhetoric remaindered from the Gore
campaign. Not even the latest rash of school shootings moved the Democrats
to speak up about gun control, a
former passion of the party that was scuttled by Mr. Gore last year.

What makes the Democrats' ineffectuality all the more bizarre is that
it's in opposition to a new president who
is hardly as formidable as Ronald Reagan and whose major policy innovations
thus far seem to be
institutionalizing nicknames at the White House and redefining medical
terminology so that each of Dick
Cheney's emergency heart procedures can be labeled as "precautionary."

Here's a scorecard on the new administration's agenda to date:

• The economy: The president has sold his $1.6 trillion tax cut as "just
right" — a "jump start" for a "faltering"
economy. Even as the market started gasping for breath this week, he
stuck to his script, saying his plan would
give the economy a "second wind." Does anyone believe that? Even were
the Bush tax cut more equitable in
offering relief to Americans with fewer Alcoa shares than his treasury
secretary, it's too little and too late to
serve as a stimulant. Eighty-nine percent of the cuts don't kick in
until 2006, and now conservatives are in full
panic that Mr. Bush's "right" number could in fact make a downturn
worse. The G.O.P., following Mr. Bush's
rhetoric, is invoking John Kennedy in ads plugging the tax cut, but
as Stephen Moore observed in The Weekly
Standard: "The Reagan and Kennedy tax cuts sliced the top tax rate
by 20 and 14 percentage points,
respectively, in the first year. The Bush plan cuts the top rate by
less than 2 percentage points. We're just not
comparing apples to apples here."

• Education: "You teach a child to read and he or her will pass a literacy
test," says Mr. Bush. But conservative
governors are already protesting the Texas model of having uniform
tests statewide. The result could be a
toothless bill and the collapse of any coherent standards that might
measure which schools are leaving kids behind.

• Faith-based initiative: This scheme has already kindled religious
wars between Pat Robertson and a trio of
religions he accuses of using "brainwashing techniques" and between
Jerry Falwell and Islam ("the Muslim faith
teaches hate"). As if this weren't enough, the Bush administration
point man on this experiment, John DiIulio,
has now injected the race card. In a speech defending the initiative,
he opened fire on Southern Baptists by
chiding "white evangelical churches" for lacking the dedication to
community service of "urban
African-American and Latino" congregations. Within days, The Washington
Post reported that the most
controversial part of the Bush package — direct government funding
of religious charities — might not make it
to the Senate for a year.

• Social Security reform: The buck was passed to a commission, which
presumably won't be recommending,
as Mr. Bush did in the campaign, that taxpayers play the stock market
with their retirement accounts.

• Foreign policy: No sooner does the secretary of state, Colin Powell,
signal administration policy on Iraq and
North Korea than Mr. Bush reverses it.

There is one area, though, where the new administration has had unqualified
success — rewarding its financial
backers. The coal industry, which gave most of its $3.8 million in
soft money to the Republicans, this week
scored Mr. Bush's reversal of his campaign promise to regulate carbon
dioxide emissions, even at the price of
humiliating Christie Whitman, the E.P.A. chief who had vouched for
her president's word. The MBNA
Corporation, the largest donor to the Bush campaign, is reaping its
reward with a "bankruptcy reform" bill that
makes it harder for its credit card holders to seek bankruptcy protection
but does nothing to regulate its
showering of credit cards on Americans (like teenagers) who are likely
to fall into debt. U.P.S., which gave 85
percent of its $1.3 million in contributions to the G.O.P., is a conspicuous
beneficiary of the White House
rollback of workplace ergonomic regulations.

Among the Bush contributors soon to step up to the plate are airlines
and the pharmaceutical companies. Don't
lose any sleep dreaming about a passengers' bill of rights or lower
costs for prescription drugs.

Will the Terry McAuliffe-led Democrats, who with Hillary Clinton's help
now rake in more soft money than the
Republicans, at least fight to reform the corrupt intersection of big
bucks and politics that produces quid pro
quos for Marc Rich and MBNA alike? The test is certainly at hand: on
Monday, the Senate at last begins its
debate of the McCain-Feingold bill that would take first steps to clean
up this system of legalized bribery.

Up until this week, virtually every Senate Democrat has been on record
in favor of reform, but up until now
that talk was cheap, since previous G.O.P. Senate majorities always
guaranteed the bill's defeat.

"Will the Democrats flip-flop with victory now in sight?" asks Scott
Harshbarger of Common Cause. "This is
the moment of truth for the Democrats," says another longtime warrior
for this cause, Fred Wertheimer of
Democracy 21. "The only way the bill fails is if a sufficient number
of Democrats abandon it."

The abandonment could take the form of signing on to poison-pill amendments
(including those endorsed by
President Bush on Thursday) that gut McCain-Feingold's already watered-down
provisions, or of seeking
cover in a disingenuous "compromise" bill, crafted by Chuck Hagel and
rightly dismissed by John McCain as
an "affirmation of soft money" rather than a potential ban of it.

"I hope the Democratic Party will stand up and be counted here," says
Mr. Harshbarger. Given what we've
seen of the Democrats this year, this may be a wish that, like a Gore
presidency, can come true only in the
Twilight Zone.